Competition Celebrates Tech Innovators Solving Real-World Challenges for Small-Scale Farmers
The Small Farm Tech Hub at CAFF is proud to announce the winners of its 6th Annual Small Farm Innovation Challenge, a competition spotlighting the promising technology-based solutions designed to help small-scale agriculture compete, survive, and thrive.
While agtech has attracted over $40 billion in investment over the last decade, small and family farms have largely been left behind. Accessibility, affordability, and right-fit technology remain significant barriers for smaller operations. The Small Farm Innovation Challenge was created to change that, directing tech innovation where it’s needed most and shining a spotlight on the farmers, entrepreneurs, students, and thinkers who are rising to meet that challenge.
“Small farms are the backbone of resilient local food systems, and farmers are among the world’s best problem solvers,” said Elizabeth Vaughan, Senior Manager, Small Farm Tech Hub at CAFF. “This challenge celebrates that ingenuity and ensures agricultural innovation works for everyone — not just the largest operations.”
About the Small Farm Innovation Challenge
Now in its sixth year, the Challenge invites farmers, entrepreneurs, students, hackers, and any farm-loving innovators to submit tech-based ideas at any stage of development — no idea is too big, too small. This year’s competition awarded $20,000 in cash prizes, along with opportunities for winners to showcase their innovations online and at industry conferences.
The competition highlights multiple categories, although any innovation can be submitted:
DIY Innovators: For open-source, do-it-yourself creators who have welded, repurposed, coded, or jury-rigged a solution to a small farm problem.
Software Innovators: For those with a marketable product or business idea offering an online or software-based solution to the challenges facing small farms today.
Hardware Innovators: For those with a marketable product or idea offering a tool, machinery, or durable equipment-based solution to challenges facing small farms today.
Social Innovators: For innovations that improve upon the social process, improving systems flow, encourage cooperation and collaboration, etc.
This Year’s Winners
Best Innovative Process for Social Good —
ShareWell Gerardo Fuentes, Farm Business Advisor, Kitchen Table Advisors, an online system for tracking water use on cooperative or multi-operational farms. This innovation provides an easy to use (especially for farmers with no tech literacy) platform on a phone to register their water usage and automatically calculate each farmer’s contribution to the master water/energy bill.
Best D.I.Y. — Fertigation and Mulch Tea Machine Harold W. Stewart III, Owner, Stewart’s Avocados and CH&H Farms, a farmer-developed process for cheaply producing bulk liquid nutrients. This innovation builds on known concepts by integrating off-the-shelf components into a simple, easily replicable fertigation and compost-tea delivery system. It has been successfully used on tree crops, flowers, vegetables, and other agricultural plantings.
Best Hardware — Precision Farming Rover Katie Bradford, Founder & CEO, Rotate8, a small, sleek and lightweight autonomous tractor. Rotate8 has built a modular, repairable electric tractor that can mechanize and automate tasks for farms of all scales, including soil prep, seeding, weeding, harvest aid, and mowing. Their solar powered rover is designed from the ground up to be as accessible as possible to farmers.
Best Mechanical Tool — 4-Row Strip Tiller Andrew Woodruff, Regenerative Agriculture Consultant, Island Grown Initiative, a smaller-scale solution to reduced tractor tillage. This tool functions like a conventional strip tiller but it is designed for smaller tractors in the 50 to 75 hp range. What’s unique about this strip tiller is its versatility to change from one row up to four rows with minimal effort. The width of the strip can be adjusted from 4” to 8” plus. Coulters, shanks, and row cleaners can be moved or swapped through a simple clamp design.
Best Software — Harmonize David Berning,
Farmer, Cardiff Tiny Farm, a nimble record-keeping solution designed for small and diversified cropping systems. Harmonize lets farmers log harvests, expenses, field notes, and more into Google Sheets simply by sending a text message—no apps, no complex workflows, no extra friction. David is currently seeking pilot farms to test out and help improve his innovation.
To learn more about this year’s winners, you can watch the virtual awards ceremony where each winner presented on their innovation.
